Dad, Mom – and Mom: The Ontario Court of Appeal's Decision in A.A. v. B.B.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 2 January 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal released its judgment in A.A. v. B.B. recognizing that a five-year-old boy can legally have two mothers and a father. The case was widely presented as another victory in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights and a fundamental reordering of parental rights and responsibilities. The analysis in this comment suggests that the real significance of the case lies elsewhere. The decision is more rightly situated in the developing caselaw on new methods of conception and parenting. At the same time, because the case is grounded in the exercise of a court’s parens patriae discretionary jurisdiction, the case simply cannot be read as allowing all children to have more than two parents. This comment will argue that the Court of Appeal’s decision in A.A. v. B.B., as sound as the reasoning may be, will likely impact on only a small number of families, despite the fact that many issues raised in that case are at the cusp of changing social and scientific conditions affecting an increasing number of families. Rather, it is time for lawmakers to initiate comprehensive law reform in relation to legal parentage.Le 2 janvier 2007, la Cour d’appel de l’Ontario a rendu sa decision dans l’affaire A.A. c. B.B., qui etablit qu’un garcon de cinq ans a legalement le droit d’avoir deux meres et un pere. L’affaire a souvent ete presentee comme une autre victoire dans le contexte de la lutte pour les droits des lesbiennes et des homosexuels ainsi qu’une reorganisation fondamentale des responsabilites et des droits parentaux. L’analyse dans le present article propose que la portee veritable du jugement soit tout autre. L’arret ferait plutot partie de l’evolution de la jurisprudence portant sur les nouvelles methodes liees a la conception et au role parental. Par ailleurs, puisque l’affaire est fondee sur l’exercice de la competence discretionnaire parens patriae des tribunaux, la decision ne peut tout simplement pas etre interpretee comme donnant droit a tous les enfants d’avoir plus de deux parents. Le present texte soutient que le jugement de la Cour d’appel dans l’affaire A.A. c. B.B., malgre le raisonnement logique qui le sous-tend, ne touche qu’un petit nombre de familles, en depit du fait que plusieurs des questions soulevees dans cette affaire sont sur le seuil des conditions sociales et scientifiques changeantes qui concernent un nombre croissant de familles. Le moment est venu pour les legislateurs d’entreprendre une reforme globale du droit portant sur les liens de parente juridiques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".